Monolith entered the 25 man Ice Crown Citadel last night for the first time. I had spent hours of time preparing for the first four encounters in the zone, and trying to remain reasonable set expectations at killing the first two or three bosses. When we entered the zone, I asked the guild to focus and take the zone with a vengeance.

And we did just that. No boss took us more than a handful of pulls, and in our 3.5 hours of raid time, we cleared the 4 bosses available to us. remember above when I said I was hoping for 2-3? Yea, that was a lie. I was trying to convince myself that it would be just fine if that is all we got down. But I knew that deep down inside that I wanted to have the wing cleared or I’d probably be disapointed…I just wasn’t admitting it to myself ;)

One of my favorite things about new content is taking a strategy and tweaking it to what works be for Monolith. One of the things that I like most about last night…and frustrated me the most as well, was that we had more people participate in the discussion of “ok, that didn’t work, how should we approach this”. I really was pleased that we had as much participation as we did, and I hope that continues as we work through the zone. It’s one of the things that I really feel shows how much we’ve grown as a guild. Or, I suppose, it shows that my stubborn side has softened up some. I let you decide which of those two you may find to be true ;)

We found a pretty major bug last night, where after we killed Saurfang, received the achievement for killing him and received the badges for killing him, he remained an active target and we could not drop combat. This, in turn, meant that we could not loot his war chest and collect our spoils. ARGH! We tried everything, including making everyone jump from the edge of the citadel and kill themselves and zone back in. No dice. Eventually we asked people to look at his known loot, and let us know if they were interested in an item and we would petition a GM about it, sorting the loot once we received it. Brade and I promised to send in our petitions, and wait in the zone until a GM contacted us or we fell asleep at the keyboard, whichever came first. We opened tickets to be greeted by the “Unknown Wait time/high volume of petitions” message, and figured it was unlikely that we would hear from anyone that night. A number of the members of our guild also entered petitions.

I am now about to do something now that I never dreamed I would be doing: posting praise about Blizzard GM/CS team. Believe it or not, within 30 minutes of my ticket being opened I had a GM sending me a tell asking me if I had a moment. I actually almost missed the tell, as it popped up in it’s own special chat window…and I was spaced out decided what we should do for dinner. I do not know if our ticket received such a quick response because of the volume of petitioners or if it was because it was a fairly large bug in an instance that they want to get resolved or if it was a combination of the two. What I do know is that within an hour of encountering the bug my ticket was completely resolved without incident.

The GM asked his questions, commented on his luck at whose ticket he responded to, with me being within a position of authority within the guild and able to make decisions (I’m assuming ALL of our tickets filtered to him), went afk for a bit to do what I assume is confirm our kill/loot spawn, etc. Upon his return, he advised me what was in the loot chest and asked if I could let him know to whom we wanted the items delivered. I took a minute to work it all out and let him know, but once I did the items were then insta-mailed to the appropriate members of the guild. I imagine the fact that I had kept the instance open quickly facilitated this process.

I don’t know if there is some sort of “priority” queue that they are filtering petitions through, you know, sort of a triage for petitions “Oh shit! This one needs a table now doc, now!”. I can only imagine that has to be the case for our petition to have gotten a GM response so quickly. A part of me feels sorry for that poor guy whose quest bugged and he’s been waiting 2 days for a reply…but I’m also kind of glad that this kind of raid bug issue was dealt with quickly and pushed to the front of the queue. All in all, I was quite pleasantly surprised by the efficiency and helpfulness that was provided to us. After years of becoming jaded from the ticket system, this was most definitely unexpected :)

What dropped, you ask?! Well, some caster cloak and two gear tokens (Vanquisher and Protector). I’m not sure that any of us realized that gear tokens were in his loot table, none-the-less the decision on how to award them was easy: One to Warrior Tank, One to DK Tank. The way I figured it, gearing up your tanks is always good…and nobody is going to argue with that decision! Win-Win.

More Random Post Patch Thoughts

They updated GridStatusRaidIcons with a release version, and it is fully functional…even though I had already manually added most of it in on Tuesday.

We ran the second and final portions of the new 5 man zone, once again utilizing the LFG tool. (ok…side note, I LOVE THIS THING! I know that I have commented before that we live on the west coast and play on an east coast server, and that sometimes that made finding groups after raids difficult. But man, Brade and I pop in there and *poof* INSTA GROUP! I honestly believe this is one of the better tools that they have implemented. /end side note). The second zone, Pit of Saron, was again well done and I enjoyed it. All I could think about on that frost boss though was “how in the hell am I going to do this on my paladin”.

The final zone Reliquary of Souls (?), however, was another story all together. I don’t know how I feel about this yet…other than I suspect it is going to become another zone that I refuse to do without a Bradetank. The second half was fun, and I thought very well done. But the first part? Ouf. We actually wiped. In a 5 man. I’m not saying that is bad…just unexpected ;) Of course, we did just wipe, we had a brade use all cooldowns, and then suavely rez Beru only to let her die again, and wipe for real wipe. Yea…can’t tank in the middle of the room! Check.

After adjusting our positioning to utilize some of the line of sight spaces available we did much, much better. But I’ll be damned if we didn’t almost die again on the second boss. Phew! By the time we finished, it was well past my bedtime, but I was happy to have seen the zones. I think they will be even more challenging for me when I switch over to my other healers.

Oh…and on that note, I’m hoping to get a hilt to start the Quel’dar quest for my priest and shaman. I think it will be a neat questline, so I do hope to see one.

Ugh, that really stinks Cass! Did I read somewhere that they were hotfixing that or was it my imagination?

We had the same thing happen to us the week Anub became available: We had gotten to him the night before, extremely late and the next night when we went in we couldn’t drop the floor :( It really sucked having to patiently wait for a bug fix so that we could kill something. I mean how do they miss a bug that big in testing?!?! The floor won’t drop, the boss won’t spawn. Those are pretty big!

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